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Jabor posted:Chain signals absolutely solve this though? The whole point of using chain signals is you want them to find a clear path all the way to the exit before entering the roundabout. So when you have two trains making right turns across each other's path, one of them will go first, while the other will wait outside the roundabout (hence not blocking the first train's path) until there's room for it to make its own turn. Unless your roundabout is friggen' ginormous so you can stick normal signals in there to stop a full-circle read (ideally splitting the roundabout into four NE, NW, SW, SE blocks.) And even then it won't stop high traffic jams like what Thotmix ran into. That will just happen no matter how robust your train network is.
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Jan 21, 2018 23:45
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EponymousMrYar posted:Right, but the problem is for that any train that isn't doing an immediate right turn off of the roundabout will end up blocking itself from going anywhere, as all the chain signals will read each other and rightfully say that the next block is occupied. That’s not how chain signals work - they look at next block in path, so if you don’t need to path through a block (I.e. the last block to connect back to your starting block) it won’t read as occupied for that train. “When more exits exist, the one relevant to the train path is taken into account.”
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Jan 21, 2018 23:51
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Some people in here have a weird-rear end interpretation of how chain signals work.
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Jan 21, 2018 23:53
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I don't. I don't have ANY interpretation of how they work really, since I haven't tried them yet :P.
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Jan 21, 2018 23:58
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Kalman posted:That’s not how chain signals work - they look at next block in path, so if you don’t need to path through a block (I.e. the last block to connect back to your starting block) it won’t read as occupied for that train. So here's what I did to debug: I saw that all my chain signals in the ring were red so I backed the train out, confirmed it's route (a 'left turn,') turned it back on automatic and watched it enter the roundabout and stop when they all changed red. So I swapped chain signals for normal signals and they stopped doing that. I will fully admit it could have been any number of problems aside from chain signal weirdness but aside from the one time I caused a jam by tooling around manually I haven't had any problems with the version I posted earlier.
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Jan 22, 2018 00:30
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I love that logistics are sufficiently advanced to create gridlock in this game. Also I imagine you hate it a little.
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Jan 22, 2018 05:37
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I mostly love it, but also hate it. Combination of 'this stuff is really kewl' and 'WHY.WON'T.THIS.WORK.PROPERLY' -- 'properly' being the way I imagine it in my head, as opposed to the way I've actually designed it work in the game, which are often very much not the same thing.
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Jan 22, 2018 22:29
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Another full mining tour revealed only one interesting thing, and it was good news; ore is backed up at the station pretty badly, and some of the mining outposts are maintaining nearly a full buffer. So I need to use more. There should be a way to accomplish that, at least.  I'm not really concerned with the Rocket right now. I think with the way things are going, it's getting finished before I get research done. I'm not going to launch it and end things before I fully complete my task though. So the main concern his here: Hi-Tech vials are the problem, and we've got 5-6 Labs running, which is pretty much where we've been.  Speed Modules are the missing link here.  And now we can trace it back to red circuits. Four of these six assemblers work full-time, the other two part-time. I'm also diverting half of what they make to the Rocket area, so that doesn't help either.  Not quite enough plastic to make it all the way up the line here.  I added a 5th plastics chemical plant, and after some stupid-looking finagling of the output belts I finally just said 'screw it' and upgraded to red ones. This works fine -- except that I am using just slightly more gas than I am producing over here now. I do, at least for the moment, have more of everything than the 30 red circuit assemblers need though. Only a few were inactive so it won't help that much -- but it will help. I do need more refining to make this sustainable though. ** Mining Productivity 14(1400 RGAPY) -- One more of these remain.  Lacking the space to add any refineries, I did what any self-respecting Factorio player would do: I created some. Cut some more trees to the west and started a second row of refineries. We now have 18 operational, 10 here and 8 at the rocket site. Turns out I probably didn't need this anyway -- the plastic was starting to back up.  This was the next issue. Red belts aren't fast enough for all the cable. Upgraded them to express.  Over a quarter finished. Definitely going to be done before the research is. Meanwhile, back at the speed module site:  This is indeed a beautiful thing to see. Time to upgrade production. Haven't had any more train jams -- it appears that issue was just a perfect storm of fail. The modules are also backing up on the route towards the rocket site, so eventually they'll all just head down towards research when that is full as well. I was up to about nine Labs operational now: that's about a 50% increase. Speed module production was expanded from six assemblers to ten, and I waited to see how that would shake out for a while. Red circuits were slowly falling behind there, so I added another six of those, for a total of three dozen assemblers on that task. That's one of every nine in the entire factory.  Now the plastic and green circuits couldn't keep up. This belt also had to be upgraded to express. We're approaching the limit of a single column here. That yields another issue. Regular inserters can't keep up with an express belt, the items go by too fast for them to grab them. (I appear to have inadvertently deleted a brief video showing this). All fast inserters it is. Then more copper-cable assemblers for this area were needed, along with upgrading the copper plate-supplying belt for those to the fast/red variety. All 36 red-circuit assemblers were now running full-speed ... and plastic started running short again. Ahh, the vicious cycle. Back to square one. A sixth plastics plant. And at that point, I finally hit the wall.  Just not enough copper to scale up any further. I was up to about a dozen Labs running, but green circuits were buckling under the strain. The trains are running smoothly, and bringing in more ore than we can smelt. I saw no reason not to add a third copper column. Even if I couldn't operate three at full capacity, whatever extra we do get will help. ** Mining Productivity 15(1500 RGAPY) -- That's the last one. 30% bonus, the best we are going to get. Two more projects. Getting close now.  That's a lot of furnaces. By the time I'd finished this and was about to decide where to merge in the new copper belt, I noticed that I had a new problem anyway.  Production vials had a big backlog, but they've worked through and are now the thing slowing down the process. We're short on electric furnaces.  Which are short on steel. I'm surprised it took this long to have a steel problem. That'll be first priority next time, and meanwhile the rocket is just over halfway finished. While heading over there, I noticed we have an oil shortage -- for a very, very stupid reason. That too will be revealed when next I resume.  Over 400 furnaces now, and total usage is a little above 62 MW. The nuclear reactor is now operating at almost a third capacity.  Remarkably stable here, and almost a half a million copper cable. 123k green circuits, 22k red, 2.8k blue. Steel, at 8.6k, is the next domino to fall. Item Count: 52 Total Production: 1.54M(+19% from 1.29M) Resources ** Iron: 50k(7k) primary, 823k(33k) steel, 5.88M Central(175k). ** Copper: 703k(50k) primary, 3.91M Central(65k). ** Stone: 62k(6k). ** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 5k(less than 1k) factory, 1M train(--), 442k secondary(16k). ** Crude Oil: 416/sec(-18).
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Jan 23, 2018 03:27
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This update is like Factorio.txt - every time you turn around there's another problem to distract you and 9 times out of 10 it's a shortage that reveals another shortage. That's a lot of furnaces though, I don't think I've ever gone that full bore on smelting. Or maybe I have, I tend to decentralize a lot of that since I inject new sources at random into the factory wherever it looks like production can't keep up. gently caress trying to run 6 belts of iron and copper through a base.
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Jan 23, 2018 04:27
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Psychotic Weasel posted:This update is like Factorio.txt - every time you turn around there's another problem to distract you and 9 times out of 10 it's a shortage that reveals another shortage. You really have to plan for it. Sometimes it's just easier to add in more raw resources part way down the line. (and by raw resources I mean plates)
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Jan 23, 2018 08:51
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I get the sense that a giant multi belt bus might be inferior to smaller systems connected by a rail network.
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Jan 23, 2018 09:12
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wiegieman posted:I get the sense that a giant multi belt bus might be inferior to smaller systems connected by a rail network. The giant multi belt bus is fine, but a mixed system works best. If you've got the production to actually saturate the belts, you can reliably pull materials off it in fixed quantities. Problems creep up when you've, say, pulled a whole belt's worth of materials off, used a belt balancer, and then need a whole belt's worth of material somewhere down the line - instead of 4 lanes of 40 items/sec, instead you have 4 lanes of 30 items/sec and you need to split two lanes and recombine them to get a saturated belt and it's a spaghetti mess. One solution is to pay attention to what your demands are, and shrink your lanes down. Once you're using a whole belt's worth of materials, you stop balancing to 4 belts and condense it down to 3. Once you're using another belt of materials, you go from 3 to 2. Then, later on down the bus, you can inject fresh belts of materials by simply running new lanes in to where the previous belts were. If you do all your manufacturing on one side of the bus, you can use the other side of the bus for resupply depots. Rather than running 8 belts of iron plates, you run 4 belts of iron plates and periodically ship in a new belt or two further down the line, or even cut the line entirely and route in a fresh set of 4 belts. Tap a whole belt of iron plates? Shift the other lanes up afterward and leave the empty space. Somewhere down the line, you've got a train station that delivers more iron plates, which you route back on to the bus.
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Jan 23, 2018 10:18
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PsychoticWeasel posted:This update is like Factorio.txt - every time you turn around there's another problem to distract you and 9 times out of 10 it's a shortage that reveals another shortage. Late-game in a nutshell. I like Olesh's ideas here. I didn't actually run all that copper throughout the entire bus, some of it joined partway through. I just smelted it all in the same place.
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Jan 25, 2018 04:04
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** Note: This covers more time than usual. The reasons for that should be clear fairly shortly.  Gribas, our oil outpost. I made two big, profoundly dumb mistakes here. This is my favorite. Three crude tanks, the middle one unused -- because it isn't connected to the others. This also means that all of the pumpjacks connected to the one on the left are useless; the oil just sits there. Rotating the middle tank once 'completes the circuit', connecting it to the other two. Equally useless are the several pumpjacks that, for some reason, are on their own little pipe network not connected to the tanks at all. Because brain fart I guess. As a result of this, only a handful of the pumpjacks were actually contributing, and they couldn't keep up with demand(particularly as their yield fell like a freaking rock), so the deliveries were not keeping up. I expect that, even with the increased demand, the now properly working oil operation will be just fine now.  As threatened some while back, I put this in where there used to be sizable copper deposits. It's a little better-designed than my existing line, and has similar capacity so this is basically a doubling. I'll probably have to upgrade the belts and possibly supply of the incoming iron ore, but otherwhise this should significantly improve things. The output heads west and hooks into the steel belt on the bus via the 'merge via splitter' method that I'm using more and more. Love that idea.  Here's something else I'm noticing more and more. The resupply bots cluster and wait around roboports, waiting their turn to recharge. In the future I need to have more densely packed roboports to spread this out -- so far as I know there's nothing that allows them to recharge more than four at a time.  Ended up upgrading the incoming ore belt to the steel are to fast ones, and reconnecting a diversionary supply down there from Central Ore. The unloading stations look fine on iron, not so much on copper now though. The problem is, at least partially, back to the bad design of combining cargo on the same wagon. Dharh Station, the one that loads both copper and iron, is backlogged with product because it's train it packed with iron -- we're oversupplied on that, so it can't unload it, and therefore doesn't room for new copper. For now I go back to reserving half of the capacity for copper to see if that's enough to handle the situation. This eventually starts lowering down the buffer at dharh, and makes supply more consistent, but not completely full. I'd need to go get more copper mining to satisfy everything, but even with the doubled production steel is still not getting the job done. ** Kovarex enrichment process(1500 RGAPY) -- The final uranium option, this allows us to use all of the nuclear products. Requires quite a bit to 'prime' the system though. 40 U-235 and 5 U-238 go in, 41 and 2 come out. Essentially it's a trade of 3 'bad' isotopes for one 'good' one. I don't need it, but it'll get the two remaining idle centrifuges working on this, just because I can. One final, massively-expensive project remains, while another 20 furnaces are laid down(10 iron, 10 steel). That's all I have room for at the present location, so I'm hoping it's enough. It wasn't. So I said screw it -- we've got lots of extra iron on the bus. I just took a line from the end of it and went a little crazy on the steel.  I'll throw the entire iron surplus into this grinder if I have to. If I have to tear the universe another black hole to do it, I will get this drat research up to speed again. With this, we're near 70 total steel-smelting furnances. Let's see how that goes after it percolates through. ** drumroll plz ** It was enough to get steel out of the doghouse for a while. And guess who went right back in it? It's our good friends the red circuits.  The steel sucking down so much iron meant that there wasn't enough left, even at max capacity, to feed the green circuits. Let the Whack-A-Mole continue! Meanwhile our final research project inches along at a pace that would allow a snail to put us in its wake, while the Rocket is nearly finished. So, time for iron to get the same treatment that copper got a while back; a third smelting column. Hurray!!  Aerial view of the stupid spaghetti-mess entirely functional ore belts heading west from Central Ore. While building the new column up, I noticed the factory was in gridlock. Because we are out of oil. Because the brilliant engineer didn't supply the Hollasch station with any train fuel, and one of them ran out at the far eastern outposts, causing gridlock and causing everything to come to a halt. Because I'm AWESOME. Fueling at unloading station? Good. Fueling only at one of two unloading stations? Bloody stupid. Oh, by the way ...  It's ready and waiting. All I have to do is slap the satellite in there and launch the thing. I could win right now. But I said I'd finish the research, and I'm finishing the blasted research. If it kills me. At least the demand for some resources will slacken now. The Domino Effect was to strike again though. I added more refining and plastic production with a goal of starting up another red circuit line, only to find the train couldn't deliver crude fast enough to support it. Then I added a second liquid wagon, with the necessary pumps and piping at both ends of the route, only to discover that green circuits had slowed down again due to lack of iron. So I hooked the third iron belt into the bus to fill the two main highways for that back-up, and finally put down a few more stone drills to address a shortage there, just as another train jam occurred, ridding the bus of any product anyway. It would take a while to fill back up, and by this point it was almost pointless: the final research was most of the way finished.  This was next: I'm short on stone bricks, with the red circuits having caught up for the time being. Go figure. After some more adjustments of the decidedly weird-looking variety, I managed to cram in another eight furnaces just above this. At that point research was at least 80% done, so there was little point in doing anything else. It was enough to bring production vials out of the cellar anyway. At one point I got back up to 20 operational labs, and by the time Hi-Tech research starting running again, it was finished.  And there it is! ** Atomic Bomb(5000 RGABPY) -- That's a bit of research there. The ultimate weapon is only somewhat more powerful than an explosive cannon shell ... but it has a massive area effect as well. It looks like the rocket launcher is the delivery system ... LET'S FIND OUT!!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxtt1kaTd8M Hmm. Appears that's too close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry4U5utB3Mg Better. Took out nearly half of primary smelting. Let's try a different 'target'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50KcSXVsZLs Nice. We could get used to this. But we won't, because we're done here. IT.IS.TIME. And what better than a night launch to show off those powerful engines. Even the Kerbals would have to be proud of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k28zRHgZbU And hey, it's another Achievement. We have now officially beaten Factorio(0.15)! After a mere 70+ hours. If you don't have the satellite in there, it does the same thing ... except you don't get the endgame screen and stats or the achievement. You just have to launch another one. After building it.  As I mentioned, there is infinite research introduced in 0.15. That's what these white vials are for that we got for launching the rocket.  There are 10 different things we can continue on with to improve our capabilities infinitely. All require the white vials. The achievement we got for all of the standard, non-infinite, pre-rocket-launch tech. And so the training game ends. I have passed the entrance exam. I'm going to try to put together some manner of tour of the final factory here next, get some final numbers just for posterity, and then I'll do a bit of a teaser for the second run.
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Jan 25, 2018 04:58
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Roundup Achievements You can't get all of the achievements in one run, but you can get a lot of them. I did about half here. Here's what was missed: ** There is no spoon(Finish in 8 hours) -- Probably one of the harder ones, esp. with the added complication of 0.15. Consider this your entry-level speedrun goal. ** No time for chitchat(15 hours) -- Same thing, just more lenient. ** Logistic network embargo -- Win the game without building any active provider or requester chests. I didn't build many; this isn't that hard, merely mildly annoying. ** Raining bullets -- Win the game without building any laser turrets. Kind of an obsolete one now since when it was put in, it was just Gun and Laser turrets. When they added flamethrowers, that changed this to be a lot easier. ** Steam all the way -- Win the game without building any solar panels. Another one that is not hard, just annoying to deal with given all the extra pollution. Also a case where the addition of nuclear power made it somewhat less problematic. ** Lazy Bastard -- Win the game by crafting no more than 111 items manually. An interesting one that basically makes the start slower, you have to move a lot of things around and be patient until you get to the second-tier assembler and can build more assemblers with assemblers. This is really close to the minimum necessary in terms of manual crafts. ** Getting on track like a pro -- Build a locomotive within the first 90 minutes. We weren't close, but this isn't all that difficult. ** Minions -- Have 100 combat robots or more following you. I never found a need for more than about 30 at a time. I think this needs a couple of the infinite researches to achieve. ** Pyromanic -- Destroy 10k trees with fire. You can make an argument that it's actually easier to complete the game getting this one than not getting it. If you go the flamethrower route very much, it will happen. All it takes is a couple of good fires. ** Solaris -- Produce more than 10 GJ per hour using solar panels. ** Mass Production 3 -- 20M electronic circuits. ** Golem -- Survive a hit of 500 damage or more. That's what the tank's for!! ** Circuit Veteran 3 -- 25k advanced circuits per hour. I was close here, at 22k. ** Computer Age 3 -- 5k processing units per hour. I only did half that at peak. ** Iron Throne 3 -- 400k iron plates per hour. Another very close one at 373k. ** You are doing it right -- Construct more machines using robots than manually. Umm yeah. 5k by robots, 86k manually. It wasn't close. The Lazy Bastard and You are doing it right achievements are pretty good indications of executing the Factorio Way(tm) -- i.e., automate everything. I'll be more fully embracing that in our second mis-adventure. BY THE NUMBERS For those who like the facts and figures, here's some production stats for this factory, lifetime: Buildings ** 21k standard transport belts ** 4k fast transport belts ** 9.6k express transport belts ** 7.5k wall sections ** 3k rail sections ** 2.6k solar panels ** 2.5k standard inserters ** 1.9k medium electric poles ** 1.3k underground belts(this one really surprised me) ** 1.1k underground pipe That's everything over a thousand. Some other notables: ** 860 electric mining drills ** 733 electric furnaces ** 693 accumulators ** 482 fast inserters(late in the game, we really started using a lot of these for train stations and the like) ** 451 curved rail sections(closer to 4k total) ** 314 tier-3 assembling machines ** 167 laser turrets ** 134 storage chests ** 49 radar stations ** 44 chemical plants ** 41 pumpjacks ** 22 refineries Etc., etc., etc,. Liquids  Not that many of these. Items     That's a lot of crapola. And most of it was needed. Finally, a tour of the factory from the resource point of view. This starts at the Xawirses station, one of the most remote. Beginning with a look at the minimap, it proceeds through a train ride to the unloading stations, through the smelting array, and then riding the winding bus throughout the factory. That'll serve as our good-bye to this creation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz-2FDGPx48 Next up: a preview of coming attractions. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 03:28
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The fastest 0.16 speedrun so far is 6 hours. 0.14 was 2h, 0.15 was 3 hours. so 8 hours used to be a lot more lenient.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:28
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Indeed. I'd guess 0.16 will eventually get that time down to about 3.5 hours or so, but there's not nearly as much margin for error. As for me, I've never been much for speedruns in any game -- just not my style.
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Jan 27, 2018 23:40
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State of Factorio As I mentioned I think somewhere around the beginning, 0.15.x took 34 patches and three months to become stable. 0.16 was released a month and a half ago, and the latest version now as of this writing 0.16.20. Particularly since some were interested in the new features, I think it's only sensible to wait for that to be ready before starting the next game. That's probably going to be at least a month, maybe two. So there's going to be a lull here, which I'm going to try to fill with a different project. This LP will return and is hopefully just getting warmed up, but an 'operational pause' is necessary here. It's not just for the changes/fixes to the game itself, which may well not be that big of a deal, but for the mods I intend to use. A lot of 0.16 stuff has been released, some haven't. I've actually made a couple of smaller defunct mods compatible with the new version myself. Preview of Coming Attractions: Factorio. Crazy-Go-Nuts Edition I'll have a full mod-list when I get going with the next game, but here I'll present a few of them that I'm sure of including the bigger ones. Before I do that though, the general approach I'm going to take is to more fully embrace the Factorio Way(tm). In the just-completed game I can't say I did better than competently. The train network was pretty basic, I didn't use blueprints much, etc. Really I let things be unless it was a big enough situation to cause a problem. Good enough to function was good enough for me. There was also a lot of late-game content that I didn't bother with, at least not much. Uranium ammo, the final armor set, etc. did not get touched. Bots were used mostly just to make my life a bit easier. And finally, it was pure vanilla. All three of those aspects are going to see a major change. Over the course of this next play-through I intend to progress from competent to much more advanced(at least comparatively) in how I play the game. What I have in mind will absolutely demand that; it's going to be quite a hardcore mod setup. And I also intend to progess well past the launching of the rocket, taking the post-game stuff as far as my computer will allow it. As far as the Factorio Way(tm) is concerned, this will be a LazyBastardPlus project. I'm taking the Lazy Bastard idea from the achievements list a step further; I will not be permitted to not only craft anything I don't need to, but also mining/building/etc. cannot be done except to the extent that I can't do it with robots. Maximum automation. So what's about to come is a much more amped-up experience that I hope will serve as a reasonable example of the kind of extremes the game can be pushed to, if one so desires. As the planning for this is still in progress, I'm open to all suggestions. That's especially true on how to present things here in the thread, as late in the last run it seemed difficult to find useful things to take screenshots of aside from 'hey look, we're low on circuits again'. Major Featured Mods ** Bob's Mods(authored by bobingabout) -- Once upon a time, in a Factorio forum long, long ago, there was a man with the coding gifts to reshape the game as he saw fit. It was he who created what is generally considered the granddaddy of Factorio mods. Essentially it keeps the costs for things about the same but increases the complexity. There are generally more tiers of things, and the game was expanded in other ways. I once, briefly, tried the early-game content for this in 0.14. ** Angel's Ores(Archangel666) -- Bob's Mods adds a lot of new resources to the game in ore form. Angel's began, before expanding to a great many other things, as a change to that process. The total number of ores are reduced from Bob's, but the process of going from mining to smelting to usable products is much more complex. The most basic, early example of how this works is the Ore Crusher. When you mine an ore in this setup, just as you mine ore or copper in vanilla, you can't smelt it right away. It needs to be crushed, which then yields usable ore and stone, creating the need for some sort of early-sorting mechanism. A two-step process has become a three-step one, and there's the need to deal with the byproducts. This is just the simplest level of things here, mind -- similar adjustments will need to be made later in the process. ** AAI Industries(Earendel) -- This adds mostly a number of vehicles to the game. One I don't think it'll be using as it doesn't fit in with the philosophy I'm going for, but the promise of this mod is to be able to automate combat, which really can't be done in vanilla. Groups of vehicles can be programmed to perform specific tasks, both military and economic. ** Extended Space Mod, aka SpaceX(LordKTor) -- The goal of launching a rocket is greatly extended. Dozens of rocket launches will be required, and associated research with quite exorbitant costs needed as well to eventually develop full FTL capability. Only then do you 'win'. These are the big ones. I have very little experience with them; I've basically launched a few test games to get an idea for the very earliest steps and how things are going to interact, but aside from that I've done nothing with them. It is very nearly a manifestation of insanity to do such a thing here; it's recommended to take on only one of the highly popular Bobs+Angels combo at a time, for example. But once again, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. More could be thrown in: Yuoki Industries is another big one but is very graphics-heavy, pyandon's new stuff is promising and insane, but there's a point at which I need my system to actually be able to run a decent-sized factory, so you have to cut it off somewhere. IMO the above modpacks are the most important ones for this. A couple of other notable small ones: ** Nanobots(Nexela) -- This adds a very early robot alternative. Nanobots can destroy trees(but don't return the resources) and build things. This allows me to automate the placement of factory buildings at an early stage. They are not nearly as capable as the later construction/logistic bots; I can't move resources around with them, and they don't recharge; nanobots are expendable, requiring me to keep building a supply of them. **Rampant(Veden) -- Improves biter tactics. They'll attempt to path around areas where they have sustained heavy losses, reinforce neighboring clusters under attack much more aggressively, retreat from battles if taking too many casualties, etc. ** Belt Overflow(sparr) -- I'm doing a number of improved realism/additional challenge small mods, but I don't expect any to have as great an impact as this one. Here's a link to what it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlqmGD9MZSA Essentially, items at the end of a belt no longer magically just stay there as the belt continues moving beneath them. This turns the whole idea of saturating belts, and in fact the concept of overloading production at the beginning of the process on it's head. Saturated belts are a terrible thing and will accomplish nothing other than making a huge mess. The goal will be to ensure enough of every product being put on a belt can be used, otherwhise disaster will ensue and quite quickly. Overconsumption instead of overproduction will be the rule of the day, and I expect long, complicated production chains will make me want to rip my hair out. I've never seen an example of anyone using this mod on a full playthrough, never mind on one with this kind of heavy-handed mod setup. It's time for some 'science' to be conducted on this idea. There will be more involved as mentioned but this should give an idea of where I'm headed with this next, and final, playthrough of this LP. It'll be a while before Factorio 0.16 is ready but all feedback is welcome between now and then. I'm downloading updated versions of the mods in my setup pretty much daily, and checking the forums every few to see what new creations are out there.
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Jan 29, 2018 07:49
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Belt overflow will drive you insane until you get circuits.  Probably not too bad with the new 0.16 input priority splitters though.
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Jan 29, 2018 13:56
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This is literally the worst thing I've ever seen. I hate it.
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Jan 29, 2018 15:10
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I foresee many problems with that overflow mod unless you really get into circuits and actively monitor how full your belts are. (Which sort of defeats the point of it in the end but whatevs.)
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Jan 30, 2018 00:24
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Oh god. Belt Overflow.  I have only ever played Bob's mods multiplayer. the thought of doing it solo terrifies me. Veloxyll fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 10:39
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Ah, mods. Enjoy the game of "modding Factorio", and I look forward to seeing what it produces in the end.
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Jan 30, 2018 13:32
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Belt overflow and a massive increase in complexity, huh? Well, oftentimes the best part of an LP is watching the LPer howl in pain and frustration
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Jan 30, 2018 16:00
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Boksi posted:Belt overflow and a massive increase in complexity, huh? Well, That belt overflow mod looks horrific. Does seem like it would be easily overcome though by extending production belts slightly and having a lot of inserters dumping production into a lot of boxes.
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Jan 30, 2018 16:35
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Oh god, belt overflow. That's torture. 
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Jan 30, 2018 23:59
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ashnjack posted:Does seem like it would be easily overcome though by extending production belts slightly and having a lot of inserters dumping production into a lot of boxes. We'll see how 'easily' it ends up being done with complicated chains, but yeah. Lots of direct insertion from one assembler to another, using chests to buffer instead of slamming everything on the belts, looping 'extra product' around to rejoin the original belt via inserters or splitters, there are a number things that can be done to mitigate the situation. I also expect to definitely prioritize quite highly getting to the point where logistics bots take over a lot of the work.
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Jan 31, 2018 00:07
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Who looked at Factorio and decided it really needs far more complications? 
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Jan 31, 2018 00:11
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Poil posted:Who looked at Factorio and decided it really needs far more complications? Modders. The fact everything is done off a few base resources is actually one of the things I like about Factorio. no having everything stop because I lack a few ounces of Pt or something
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Jan 31, 2018 00:23
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Veloxyll posted:Modders. Or having a few extra ounces of Pt show up randomly after smelting.
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Feb 2, 2018 14:25
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Thotimx, I don't know what's going on in your life right now bro, but self-harm is never the answer
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Feb 3, 2018 00:03
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Rofl. Challenge setup aside, I've never been a fan of the belt-magic including no pollution created or power required along with suspending everything in mid-air forever or whatnot.
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Feb 5, 2018 04:26
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Thotimx posted:Rofl. Challenge setup aside, I've never been a fan of the belt-magic including no pollution created or power required along with suspending everything in mid-air forever or whatnot. I'd be fine with them taking 1 or 2 watts per belt. They do make noise so biters will target them. Even if belts could self-propagate power a short distance, so you didn't need a field of power poles to run belts.
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Feb 8, 2018 05:06
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Just a quick update here: Factorio is currently on 0.16.30. They still seem to be finding a significant number of crash bugs and squashing them, although we seem to be near the end of that process. Some of the mods are not yet in their final form either, and a few things are still being added. Vanilla just got refined concrete, a slightly better version of standard concrete, for example. So the wait continues but progress is most definitely still being made on all fronts.
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Mar 18, 2018 17:39
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16.35 was certified as the first 'stable' version over last weekend. So now it's just up to the modders. Whenever Bob stops adding/changing stuff which he's been doing for some weeks now, I'll start doing a bit of testing and probably get this show on the road shortly afterwards.
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Mar 29, 2018 01:35
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This show will get back on the road tomorrow. Right now I'm pretty happy with how the collection of mods I'm using turned out, although it's still quite early in things: I just played through a few updates to make sure the startup wasn't a total disaster that I'd have to abandon. Factorio is presently on 0.16.47, and some things are still being changed in modworld but that will always be the case. The major stuff seems to be in, working, stable, etc.
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Jun 5, 2018 21:35
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Restart delayed due to technical issues, which I wish I'd discovered sooner than I did. Still coming, just will take a bit longer.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:02
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Thotimx posted:Restart delayed due to technical issues, which I wish I'd discovered sooner than I did. Still coming, just will take a bit longer. Factorio.txt
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Jun 7, 2018 08:34
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Heh. Not a Factorio technical issue per se, more a video recording type of one. It's forced/inspired me to change my approach to the video side of things to something that will actually be more fitting for this anyway, I think -- if I can pull it off.
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Jun 8, 2018 06:14
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 19:52 |
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https://youtu.be/sv9DjJBBInU The Factorio Way And we're off on the go-nuts game here. I expect a very long ride. First up, this is going to have videos with my incoherent ramblings accompanying each update. After hemming and hawing about, I've decided to go with a montage/highlights approach. A lot of the more tedious gameplay will be cut out of the videos, which will be focused on significant changes to the factory and the impact of those changes, different things I thought about/tried and decided not to use, etc. I'm also sticking with the previously planned approach, hence the title: the goal is for me, the player, to do as little as possible. Everything that can be done with reason by machines, will be done by machines. And hopefully I'll be able to carry this into the megabase stage, well past the point of 'winning'. At that point and beforehand to a degree I'll have a goal of a modular, train-based collection of inter-connected facilities, rather than one enormous central factory. Major Mods A few different categories, but here's what I'm running. The major ones are those that make big, sweeping changes. ** Full Bob's -- Generally just complicates things more. Longer more complex production chains, more tiers of things, etc. ** Full Angel's -- Same, but designed to co-exist with Bobs. Particularly in the area of petrochemicals and ore, so this is more on the end of resources and refining processes. ** Space X -- Much longer and more complicated process, adding expensive space-based research to go from rocket launch to FTL travel before you can escape the planet and 'win'. ** Advanced Autonomous Industries(AAI) -- Biggest part of this is various vehicles and the tools to automate combat & expansion. Automation Mods A few smaller ones are being used to allow for me to achieve the desired playstyle. ** Logistic Train Network(LTN -- Improved automation of trains, stations, etc. ** Nanobots -- Early, expendable bots that make it possible to turn over some tasks to robots sooner than would otherwhise be possible. ** Recursive Blueprints - The mod that made the Grey Goo self-expanding factory possible. I may reach a late-game stage where using this is useful, if I can figure out how which is far from a given. Challenge/Realism Mods The biggest group here, a set of gameplay changes that I think will prove interesting. ** Air Filtering Advanced - For use in combating the pollution-related issues of Global Warming. ** Belt Overflow - The biggest one, turning logistics concerns on their head and making it more challenging to design intelligently. Let's just say it's already caused a few headaches in the very early going. ** Bot Servicing - Bots will occasionally break down and need repair, adding a measure of unreliability and maintenance to their use. ** Day/Night Extender - Here for use with Realistic Power in extending the day/night cycle length. ** Dirt Path - Heavily traveled terrain will 'wear out', creating desert-like areas over time. This isn't just an aesthetic effect, as pollution will not be absorbed in these areas, allowing it to spread further. ** Global Warming - Desertification and rising water levels effects based on the current amount of pollution. It is literally possibly to destroy the planet with your factory's effect on the environment if this is left unchecked. ** Ore Chaos - Ore fields are not 'clean', but rather have random patches of other ores in them. This makes the logistics of ores that much more involved. ** Rampant - Gold standard mod for improving biter tactics, they'll assist clusters under attack from further away, probe for weaknesses in defense, retreat from prohibitively high losses, etc. ** Rampant Arsenal - A more recent mod by the same author, adding turrets to combat the Rampant Biter threats. ** Realistic Power - Energy is generally more difficult to come by and less efficient, particularly early on with coal-based power. As recommended, a full 24-hour day/night cycle is enabled here. ** Recycling Machines - Any archaic equipment, or things I've overproduced, can be broken down and part of the resources reclaimed. I've set this to 1/4th, meaning I'll need four items of any particular kind to get back the resources used for one of them. ** Satellite Radar - The most elegant solution I've seen to the need for better late-game scanning. Each rocket launch with a satellite adds a synergistic bonus, with radar capabilities leveling up depending on how many 'communications satellites in orbit' there are. ** Science Cost Tweaker - Normal setting for this, which somewhat increases late-game research costs. More importantly, it also creates unique items for research, as opposed to the vanilla way of re-using turrets, gear wheels, etc. for that purpose. I like the idea of creating and using 'scientific instruments' or whatehaveyou that don't have any other practical purpose. Misc. Mods The final group just adds a bit of this or that. ** Shiny Icons - Improved graphical touches. ** Shiny Angel's GFX - Same for Angel's Mods. ** Shiny Bob's GFX - Ditto here. ** Asphalt Roads - A small additional vehicle speed bonus over concrete, and better visually as well. Adds to a tech path that needed an addition IMO. ** Bottleneck - Visual indicators on various machines indicating their status at-a-glance; very useful for quickly identified production chokepoints. ** Progressive Running - The player accelerates steadily instead of essentially going from '0-to-60' in an instant.  You can just barely see me there because of everything that's going on. This starting crash sequence is a feature of AAI that I quite like. Instead of just dropping you on the planet in 'here you are, go have fun' fashion, the idea is that the ship has just hit the surface and now it's all blowing up. Somehow I've surivived in the middle of all the wreckage. This game is a 'take whatever I'm given' not a 'restart and wait for optimal conditions' deal, and this isn't a terrible starting situation but it's not good either. Here we can see it's a desert biome, meaning less trees and pollution will spread more quickly. That last part is quite bad for me. Fires spread and explosions follow. They die down after a bit and then it's time to start salvaging the wreckage.  At that point I can see just how dark it is. And it's going to be dark for hours, so I might as well get used to it. As shown on the right, the various bits of wreckage contain supplies. The salvaging operation takes a couple of minutes, with items scattered over a moderately-wide area. I also chop up one dead tree in the area for use as startup fuel.  Here's what I have to start, with my personal edits to the setup noted: ** 4 Stone Bricks ** 2 Raw Wood(from the tree) ** 1 Motor(required for pretty much any kind of machinery) ** 4 Basic Electronic Boards. "Basic". And yet there are actually two precursor boards before you can even build them, and some additional research, etc. In order to make my life a little more sane, I doubled this from the default two. Under my approach to playing this the startup would drag on for literally twice as long as it's already going to without the minimum required for my first early goal. ** 8 Copper Plates ** 30 Iron Plates(usually starts with closer to 40) ** 1 Steel Plate Normally there are three basic starting machines and a steel axe already provided. I've eliminated those for a more truly 'starting from scratch' feel. And look at the Crafting side: 11 categories to choose from and I've just started.  Here's the starting area. Not a lot of trees, and the starting resource patches are pretty spread-out. That's not good either. There is some of everything, but that's about the only positive thing I can say about this. First Objective: Self-Replication Any Lazy Bastard or similarly oriented run has to start with this goal. I need to get to the 'machines building machines' stage, or more specifically the point where I can build an assembler than can build other assemblers. Like in vanilla, that's the assembling machine 2, which requires four ingredients and can produce 4-ingredient recipes. The assembling machine 1 requires 3 but can only produce 2-ingredient items, so that doesn't work. This is why I added the extra basic electronic boards, because it saves me from a bunch of added tech and buildings that would be required to make those; 4 are needed for the assembling machine 2 so now I'll have exactly what I need there. Some crafting will be necessary to get to that point, but very little will be afterwards. So I'll do only what is strictly necessary on that front. Some basic resources will be needed. To start with, I need to mine for coal as fuel, much like in a normal vanilla game. I have everything needed for a burner mining drill(1 Motor, 4 Stone Bricks, 4 Iron Plates). This is a bit more involved than vanilla which just needs a furnace(made out of raw stone not bricks), plates and gear wheels(not a motor, another step up). This kind of difference will be seen a lot. So after crafting that and heading west to the coal field, I feed one raw wood into the drill and away I go. We've seen this movie before:  I need a little over 50 coal, and there's nothing else I can usefully do while waiting for it. That wood gets me a coal, which gets me a few more coal, and soon I'm on the way. Takes a few seconds for each to come out, a few minutes to get all I need.  The good news is that a lot of buildings only require half the power in the Realistic Power mod. The bad news is that fuel sources are only a quarter as useful(coal is usually 8 MJ, wood 4 MJ in vanilla), so the actual effectiveness or efficiency is half of what it was. And worse still, coal pollution has been doubled. But it's not like there's a choice; it's the only fuel I can automate mining of. It's coal ... or coal. So i take coal. Here each unit of coal gets about 3.7 units more mined out before it's used up, meaning that to store up 50 units I actually need to mine a total of about 64. I need some stone, so I take out a nearby rock, and then ...  This is Saphirite. Err, mostly. I'm talking about the dark blue stuff. There's also light blue(Stiratite), red(Rubyte), and amber-colored stuff(Bobmonium). And of course trees. And they are all mixed together, though most of this area is indeed saphirite. Which is what I want next. The mixing-together comes from Ore Chaos, which doesn't bother us much now but when I get to doing mass production it'll certainly complicate things. For the moment I can just plop down a miner on a decently clear section. Also look at the right-side panel(had to shrink it down for this shot). So we can get iron from this. And copper. And silicon. And Nickel. And Rutile. And Zinc. Bobs/Angels does this thing where the four core ores mentioned above can be made into a slightly insane variety of things, depending on the processes they go through after being mined. That whole idea of mine the ore, smelt the plates, and transport ... it's gonna be just a bit more involved. We aren't in Kansas anymore. Next up is a stone furnace. That's easy enough to make from the stone I just gathered. Then I can use it to bake the rest into stone bricks. I use some of those and some of my iron to make a third machine, the Burner Ore Crusher.  As you can see, this thing thinks it's an assembler. You have to choose a recipe before proceeding. But the most important thing is that we have two choices. There will be a great many more, but right now there's two, for saphirite and stiratite. Both require two units of mined ore, and result in two units of crushed ore and one unit of crushed stone. There are no stone patches in Bobs/Angels; instead we'll get it as a byproduct. At least early on, we'll get a lot more of it than we want.  Here's our first, most-basic, production chain. Iron smelting at it's most elementary. The drill empties into the ore crusher, which I must regularly take crushed ore out of and put it in the furnace. There, three crushed saphirite ore is turned into two iron plates. The end result of all this is two plates and some crushed stone for every three ore mined. Of course I also need to make sure there's enough coal in each. Note the indicator lights on each building. Red means it can't operate due to some shortage; yellow means there's some finished product but something is missing to be able to continue; and green(like in the coal drill picture earlier) means currently working. This is from the Bottleneck mod. We can look at this situation and see that all three need attention but esp. the ore crusher. I need a little over 100 iron plates from this. Saphirite is the fastest ore to mine but this will take a bit of time, and burn through most of the coal that I've got on hand. Most is used in mining, some in smelting. The crusher works very quickly and without much energy required, so that at least is a nice thing. The crushing can be done by hand - it just takes four times as long for the same result.  If this looks familiar, that's because it should. Same setup, but the Stiratite patch east of the starting area will now yield to us copper, using the other starting crushing recipe. Again we can see multiple things can eventually come from this ore. It's also harder; 1.5 hardness, 2 mining time, both of those increases from 1.0 and 1.5 with saphirite. The long and the short of it means that we need twice as much coal to mine a unit of stiratite. Fortunately I only need 10 plates of this, so it's a short process. Then I've got(barely) everything I need for the first building session. To go about that, I head back to the coal field. The first semi-permanent structures are now going to be put in place, and they're all burner-based. In vanilla, the deal is get to electric power so you can research. In this mod set, you can't get electric power until after you've started research. There's an extended time on coal-based burner tech, which I think is all to the positive as you don't rush by it quite as quickly. So if I'm going to need coal for a while, it's sensible to build where the coal is.  First, I need more bricks; the next couple of buildings will need them. Specifically I need six more, which means using some of the crushed stone I had on hand to make regular stone, and then baking them in this. Works out quite well, as a single unit of coal is just enough to get me what I need.  In order to do any research at all we need a lab; here's the burner version. Efficiency isn't great and coal pollutes a ton of course, but it's literally the only way forward. Then I need some red vials.  Err, some Sacrificial electromagnets? That's a rather pretentious title. Whatevs. This, from the ScienceCostTweaker mod, I rather like regardless. One, it's well-organized; the vial and the two things you need for it(electromagnet core, electromagnet coils) next to it. But also it doesn't use the same items you need elsewhere in the factory, ensuring a specialized and unique production chain. This is what I needed the copper for, to build enough of these. Five for our first task, which is ...  This is shrunk down to a pretty absurd degree, but I did that so you can get another small taste of what we're in for. The research tree branches out severely pretty soon. And it gets worse. Much worse. Basic automation here grants us access to two highly-important things; Burner Assemblers and Burner Inserters. The assembler is particularly key because it'll let me stop crafting things. Any more research I do I can make the components in that, and I can build other things also.  The inside of the lab lights up like a campfire, and inside there's a whole bunch of different types of sciency stuff that I don't even want to think about yet. We won't bother with considering what to research next just yet.  The burner assembler needs more iron and stone bricks, but no more copper. It's a significant expense but not as much as the lab. Regardless, it's the first machine that can actually build stuff for me. So it's progress. The next bit is a bunch of convoluted switching of stuff around. To get setup for the next round of resource-mining I need: ** Iron Chest(1) ** Burner Inserter(2) ** Basic Transport Belts(4)  Well this isn't hard. Set the recipe and throw in some iron.  These need a motor and an iron plate. But motors need iron gear wheels. So I need to make the gear wheels, and then the motors, and then the burner inserters, and more gear wheels for the transport belts ...  These cost the same as vanilla standard belts, they just aren't as good; a quarter slower. They'll work fine for what I need though. After doing all the switching of recipes and materials in and out, I end up with not a whole lot left:  If you're wondering why my inventory is so small, that's a mod setting but it's not really going to matter. When you are having machines do everything, there's no point in carrying a lot of stuff. But yeah, no coal left, 1 copper, 3 iron. This was a very bare-bones start as intended. And for what purpose? Well we have the lab and the assembler that can be used, so we can research without crafting. But there's also this:  This can get me as much coal as I want(up to the miner running out of resources in it's area of operation) without me doing a single solitary thing. It's the simplest setup I could think of for doing so. Coal comes out on the belt, the first inserter will feed itself and then the drill, any extra goes to the second inserter which feeds itself and then stores any surplus in the chest. I don't have to stand there and manually feed in each.individual.piece every few seconds. And so our journey has begun, with all of that taking a little under a half-hour in-game.
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Jun 10, 2018 20:42
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